Oh yes, we institute rules of not traveling with more than 1 other person on the server.
Keep in mind, people can barter/collaborate.
You can transfer symbols to Descriptive books, and then another person can read that symbol into their Notebook.
It's really the initial generation of the world that kills it, since a player loads 441 chunks and all of those have to be generated at one instant. But yeah, if you want to play Mystcraft.... some servers disable Descriptive book crafting and the server admin creates a few worlds for people to play with.
Might be a good thing to do, with the new RP2 Cave World marble spawning bug which can crash your server.